Discover our collection of water paintings for sale or available to rent online today. Showcasing art from some of the most exciting artists active today, our collection is ever-evolving with vibrant, powerful pieces. Browse today to find the water painting for you, with a variety of styles and subjects available. Not sure where to start? Explore our expressionistic, realistic and figurative water paintings.

Jean-Luc Lacroix creates incredibly expressionistic landscapes which blur the distinctions between land and sea. His painterly style and textured canvasses add a sense of erratic movement that draw the viewer into his environments.

Poiscaille (2019) uses varying textures and mediums, such as blurred ink and thick paint, to make the painting appear submerged underwater.

The History of Blue

Today we naturally associate water with the colour blue. However, some scientists believe that early humans were partially colour blind, with no concept of blue and no words to describe it.

Evidence of this is found in Homer’s Odyssey, where the ocean is described as ‘wine-red sea’. The first blue was invented by the Egyptians around 2200BC and is known as Egyptian blue.

Landscapes and Seascapes

Water is present in seascapes and often in landscape paintings. Incorporating it into an image can help artists break up the composition through varying textures and colours. In many landscapes water is placed at the forefront of an image, adding a sense of movement which can draw the eye in and around the image.

Symbolic Meaning of Water

Water can also have a highly symbolic meaning. In art and literature, water symbolises change, due to its mobility and fluidity, and purity and cleansing, which in turn can symbolise a sense of clarity, serenity and calm. Incorporating water into an image can impact the atmosphere and mood of the painting, such as in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1480).

This image represents Venus, the goddess of love, sex, beauty and fertility, arriving on the shore after being born from the sea fully-grown. This connection between Venus and the water symbolises the intimate connection between water, life and fertility.

The Romanticists

While water can symbolise serenity, it can also convey the uncontrollable force of nature. The Romantic movement, at the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, often depicted nature in this way. Many Romanticists became interested in the individual’s connection to nature, either as being at one with nature or as being overwhelmed by nature’s power.

Casper David Friedrich was a German Romanticist painter who depicted the power of nature over man to evoke feelings of the sublime; of both awe and terror. Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (1818) exemplifies the raw power of nature by juxtaposing the stormy sea with a small figure.